So I’ve spent the past few days deciding how to manage some student plagiarism concerns – a frustrating and disappointing experience. En route, I’ve found some useful tools – both for detecting plagiarism, and for educating students about the issue.
Indiana University has an excellent site to educate students (and staff!) to recognise plagiarism: Indiana University Bloomington Plagiarism Tutorial
Wikipedia also has a good discussion of plagiarism suitable for educational purposes.
This time around, I detected plagiarism the… er… old fashioned way: I googled it… As it turns out, my university subscribes to the plagiarism detection service: Turnitin, which might have made my life a bit simpler, had I realised this earlier.
A free detection tool – ironically used as a marketing device by a site that offers students options to purchase purpose-written essays – is located here.
In each of the cases I’m managing at the moment, the plagiarism took the form of stringing together quotations from various works, so that the overwhelming majority of the essay content was taken directly or near-directly from other sources, with occasional edits for style or to relate the passage to the topic. The original sources actually were cited – sometimes immediately following the quotation, sometimes elsewhere in the essay – but quotations marks were not used to indicate the extent of the borrowing.
This kind of plagiarism is obviously very easy to catch, but also a bit exasperating because it indicates that the student has actually done a reasonable amount of the work required to produce a good academic essay. They’ve essentially just stopped short of the final step, where you internalise what you’ve studied and integrate the content into your own analytical framework. Not that internalising content and developing a personal analytical framework is an easy thing to do. It is, however, one of the more enjoyable and rewarding aspects of academic work – often more enriching than the original assembly of research materials.
Of course, from a student’s point of view, it can also seem like the riskiest dimension of academic work – the moment where you release the crutch of someone else’s information, expressive skills, etc. , and are thrown to your own devices. Part of an instructor’s job is to make students feel safe taking this risk and, for this reason, uncovering an incident of plagiarism is always at least a bit personally disappointing.
On the flip side, plagiarism is unfortunately increasingly easy for the… er… properly motivated students. I’m not naive enough to assume I’ve caught every example.
Having decided how I will manage the current situation, I am now trying to decide whether I need to modify anything pedagogically, to minimise the chances of this occurring in the future. I did spend some time discussing citation and quotation standards in the course, and I provided some detailed feedback on individual student essays. I was generally dissatisfied, however, with the tendency of certain kinds of citation errors (short of plagiarism, but also short of a full and complete citation for materials used) to recur in student work. I may experiment next time with some alternative approaches to the issue – perhaps handing work back and asking for corrections, rather than just providing feedback on what has been done incorrectly; perhaps some workshop activities on proper citation form for the tutorial sessions. I’ll be thinking through the issue as I prepare my courses for next term.